But Doctor, how could I not feel like a big scumbag about the whole thing.  You know, taking all that opportunity, and like, look where I am now.  For no good reason.

And then you, you know, wait on people and some of them, yes, like Melloncamp says, it's like playing to a room full of drunks chattering away...  And try to deal with that situation without not wanting a good glass of wine when you go home, just to unwind.

So here I am, fifty, and what have I done with my life.  Nothing respectable, like being a lawyer, or a doctor, or a banker, or even having gone to graduate school to be like a college professor.

And all that unspeakable stuff, that trap, that steel trap created by boy girl interaction and my own lack of action, my own, I don't know, misguidedness that sprung from the thing...  So hard to talk about because it's all locked in this tight knot you can't begin to explain as a way to unravel it all, except that, yeah, like you said, just like you said, she said a few things that made me feel like a scumbag, which I suppose is my Achilles heal.

So anyway, you go through life, and you have good intentions and pure spiritual practices and yoga, but, because of it all, because of the stress and the unhappiness and the sense of being defeated over my own goodness, like, what are you left to do but conclude that you are the Prodigal Son himself.

What do you do?  Do you quit everything and start all over again.  Jesus says as much;  if thine eye offends thee, cut it out, something like that.  Sounds a little brutal.  But better to lose a hand or whatever than to be sunk in the depths with a  millstone around your neck.

Why is it me, the peacemaker, who ends up as the outcast, the deviant?  Shouted down, as if.

We could all use a little positive feedback in this world, no?  And that's just the thing.  Unintentionally, we get hurt, and when we're hurt, we hurt the other...  And on and on, into a spiral.

SO.  Here I am.  Talking to you.  And you are kind enough to soften the blows, and say kind things to me...

But there I am, shrink of entire neighborhoods, talking to anyone and everyone, and what do I get out of it?  What do I come home to?

"It's not the ego so much, but the attachment, the identification with the ego as our self," therapist says.  She pulls a yoga book off the shelf and finds a quote from the Upanishads.

I saw John Mellencamp on PBS last night, talking to Jan Wenner.  And he's saying that he needs to write and work and paint and make music, because if he doesn't it's all turned inward against the self, that he becomes the worst hypochondriac.  "I do it because I have to," plain and simple.

That resonated with you.

Yes, it does.

I got up and checked out of the hotel in Chinatown, sat in Roosevelt Park down there, cool, but the sun was out, and I was thinking of Kerouac's Holy Goof, the Dostoevskian idiot he knows himself to be.  And I thought about the last passage from On the Road, where he's sitting out overlooking the river across at New Jersey rising up, and the whole land mass, much like the ending of The Great Gatsby, the fertile breast, sitting on some broken down pier, I think of Dean Moriarty.   I think of Dean Moriarty.  So on my own after the party and everything, catching up with Daitz, I have to entertain myself, so was Kerouac down in Battery Park?   Well, I just ended up walking along, everyone out at brunch in cool restaurants.  Very stylish, very hip.  So I just walk along, slowly, my feet and legs feeling it.  I wanted, or I thought of venturing up to the West Side, where she grew up, I mean, just to get the vibe, for some kind of understanding of it all, the completely stupid misunderstanding between us.  It's sunny out and everyone is out of their winter burrows, catching the light, there in front of the Flatiron, in Union Square, back down in the Village...

And this is the life I should have led, the place where I wanted to be, with creative people, publishing, theater, music, art...  And every where it's a beautiful place.  The wind is blowing, the air is fresh, energizing you, the water from the tap tastes great, sweet, pure.  People are cool...  There's no place like it.  And I'm walking along miserable enough, such that I understand Lincoln saying how miserable he is that if he took it and shared it with all the rest of humanity there would not be a single smiling face anywhere on the globe...

Hemingway has a line about New York, to the effect that writers there are like fireflies caught in a bottle, feed off each other but not experiencing broader deeper reality, life...  He was a bit of a dick, though...  But, I'll give him credit because he had it and he knew it and he even had a name for it, the black dog, and to an extent he knew how to treat it, or try to treat it, by writing, of course.  He had, I think, a fairly good sense of humor about it, or, an understanding so good that it could be comical as well as tragic, that writing was like bringing back to show to someone the pieces of something that had been magnificent, a treasure, but that blew up or something, like lifting a torn limb and saying, look...  Something like that he wrote somewhere...  He had his Agnes Von Kurowsky, with whom he would never speak to or of, except early on in his work explaining her Dear John letter, but whom he obviously was never able to forget.  A terribly shy man, not that he would come off that way, a photographer, Karsh, once said.

And so, is it that the Universe is trying to tell us something, like how to evolve, when we go through such unhappy things?   Like, why me?  I'm a sensitive guy, or maybe too much so, kind, kind way beyond his own level of competence to deal smoothly with things like city girls.  Too subject to emotion.

Unless he writes.  Unless he gets the chance, or takes it, to sit down and figure and scribble in his notebook...  That's the only thing that soothes it, the dark burning sensation of hopelessness, and you have to do it every day...  Great.   Well, at least you know...

Anyone can come along and tell you, well, just don't think about her.  Even your mom, tells you that, 'are you still thinking about her,' or, more plainly, and speaking from wisdom well-earned, 'keep thinking about her and your sunk.'   My boss tells me, his French personal business-man wisdom, 'you can't think of the past.'  Well, everyone tells you that.  Live in the moment.  Live in the present.  Well, OF COURSE.  But...  you know, it's not that easy, it's not that simple.  We're sensory-perception beings with minds and memories that hold such things out of their very nature, and you can only gather that the purpose of this is to teach us something.  What?  How not to be an idiot next time a girl like that so rare comes along and you really like each other but something gets in the way of you being yourself, unable to know why....  Is this part of the process that brings us to our destiny, the evolution of the species out of the cold hard carapace of the self and ego attachments...  How do we share that?  It seems too unhappy a thing to share, unless there really really is a point after all, and that there will be at some point some sort of undefined peace or happy resolution...  Like something out of A Tale of Two Cities...  if you had to portray it, and maybe that's indeed the only place where such things can exist, in art, in the mind, in our own wishes of how the blank meaningless story of life plays out in your fond childhood sandbox that's a whole lot different from reality.


I wouldn't wish being a writer on anyone.  Rather should they be cold literal lawyers and bankers, who only see things cheerily by the light of ineffable rules, no shades of grey.  No many ways to interpret, did you make money or lose money, did the judge agree or not agree....  Even Jesus says something like this, resolve things with thy neighbor lest ye get cast into jail for the rest of your life.   Even Jesus... for all the lilies of the fields and the sparrow's raiment... Don't leave things up to chance, or you are going to pay dearly beyond dearly.

An entire city of the world shows you the place where you should have had your life, and instead you're on a bus seated next to an obese Latin American woman watching the flats of New Jersey and Delaware and Maryland roll past you.

Well, at least I have a therapist to talk to about things I'd be too shy and circumspect to really want to talk to with anyone, something I can only share bits and pieces with politeness looking over my shoulder telling me to forget about the whole thing, not burden anyone with it.  Their wisdom wouldn't make a bit of difference anyway.  You still go through what you go through.  Heretical as that might seem to the economic way of life.  "Here, the whole thing will bring you pain for the rest of your life and make you question yourself."  That would at least be the truth.  The sorry truth that you'll never know happiness, real happiness, and that you're screwed and that all you can do is just sort of carry on in a world without much joy.

By early Friday morning the barman has begun to digest the week.  Tuesday it was not possible to fall asleep for hours after the shift, even where there was ample help on a busy night.  And Wednesday, forget about it.  The night started, as far as the drink part, shortly after ten, with a Guinness and some good conversation.  A party of regulars in the corner, one of them, great guy, fairly toasted, but watched over by his pals.  It's been a night of plates of at least ten different shapes and sizes are haphazardly stacked at the barman's feet underneath the rail of liquors at the barman's sink work bench, the plates stacked on a platform of three hard plastic cubicle mild crates, and the silverware is thrown down into plastic quart sized containers.  (Thrown as darts, for anger relief at certain points, where before the man, years ago would drink a shot of tequila, as an 'attitude adjuster,' according to the laws of Sir Lawrence King.)  At a certain point, after confusion over gibson and gimlet, a running low on IPA, after another hit of new customers, the barman yells a four letter job through hissed teeth, kicks the trashcan over, the beeper of the pager, meaning food is up down in the kitchen, adding its own little ring, and wishes to start throwing and breaking into mincemeat all the dirty plates and the empty butter cups, and I a college graduate what the fuck am I doing here with this, and then when you get home you can't fall asleep, there's an ache, a great feeling of having been greatly sidetracked in life, what will the future bring, so, full of Guinness by now, grilled salmon a boring dinner, you switch to wine, and then, easily, you're up to seven, in this case watching a documentary on Hillary's Everest expedition along up the Kumbu Icefall and the Lhotse Face and the South Col with Tenzing Norkay.  Anything to calm down, and calming down is hard, and thus no wonder, looking for that calming buzz in the head, that reassuring feeling.

Oh yeah, later the next day, the barman sleeps soundly well into the afternoon, waking parched, guilty for having wasted a nice 72 degree Spring day.  Reluctantly sizes up the lot of house keeping immediately before him, ugly pile of laundry, but at least evidence the dishes were washed, by hand, and put to dry, so that there are tea cups, but stilll a few dirty plates, and a frying pan with the glue of scrambled egg residue upon it.

The sense of the lyrical a barman has, a sense of the sadness of life.  And yet, it's most obvious that it is we, of free will, who chose, by our attitudes, whether we shall be happy or sad.  This is why, it is reported, that self-confidence is the thing, the cure-all.  The literary questions involving his earlier life are somewhat Chekhovian.  Why did the Doctor, overseeing the mentally ill in the story Ward No. 6, fall into paranoia?  Why or what created the shy soldier and his shyness and the fact of the rich and beautiful perfumed kiss he gets one night in the dark of the receiving nobleman's house, followed by anticipation and expectation, as we all know, where it will lead?  What created the underlying wish to communicate so gently with someone that the communication, even when started well, went off track?  And then, if the follow through is called into question, then how does one estimate his own ability to stand up for himself, when there is always that sort of moral edge he falls over into the depths of pondering, of time alone, of inaction, of reflections that really don't get you very far as claiming what you want to claim.

That was the perfect world, imagined, of course, you left behind, the world in which everything works out according to its inner germ.  Yeah, sure, the world will be perfect, because look how well and decently things are going, and you've been able to read poetry and Shakespeare with some of the finest readers in the finest of settings.  Behind it all showed the gem of wisdom, and you had no fear.

But in the meantime, there are careers to be had, and things to do in the real world, and the barman's isolated life and strange hours only make sense if compared with that of the lawyer.

I end up listening to a few Billy Bragg songs, and some of it is nostalgia, of the sort that exactly makes me of the sadness I want to escape from into the world of the practicality my therapist speaks of.   Some of it is, as if politically, or seems, the way out, the way to reaffirm values in my childish innocent, low-on-adult-business-how-it-works-understandings world.

I get a text from the barman the next night.  "I heard you took your frustrations out on a couple of six packs..."  He knows what jazz night is like with the particular co-worker.  And, yeah, too many people know me.



A long afternoon nap helps put the week behind me.  Friday night, not so much energy but to restock the larder.  I'd like to go out for some live music, a friend playing out in Arlington, but I ned to get ready for a quick trip to New York City for a friend's birthday.  In the back of my mind, I almost have a hard time trusting my own choices.  If I err on the side of taking it too easy and simple and homebound, then I could potentially be missing good stuff, relationships, new friends.  I know I'm stubborn.

Thoughts on a warm night in early April, 1865.

Looking up at the stars is like making love.

That clear almost blue dark night sky that's pure like crystal, the elements aligned in it.

There's the Big Dipper.

And there's that old mockingbird, up in his tree, singing away.

Mary, do you remember...

In tune with nature and the feminine and the archaic I go for a walk again, down into the woods to birdwatch.

I find the fish have returned to Rock Creek, alewives, holding in the current.  A pleasant surprise, nature doing its thing.

I'm reminded of the Raymond Carver short story, about the guy from the lumber mill named Dummy who receives a 50 gallon container of juvenile fish to stock his pond.  The character of the idiot who has some gut level emotional connection to nature.  I am reminded of Ernest Hemingway's Nick Adams crossing the proverbial bridge back to nature in Big Two Hearted River, standing above looking down at trout holding themselves steady in the current above the pebbly bottom.  The return to the gut level human-being-in-nature heartfelt cleansing response, that bird watchers and cherry blossom seekers know, finding a way to be in touch with the feminine, with nature, and the archaic.  A background in Moby Dick, the experience of the sea though the eyes of the 'savage harpooner' Queequeg.

There is the political side of it.  Robert Kennedy defiantly going out of his way in a scary helicopter ride to visit a tribal chief during his visit to South Africa, not a welcome foray in the eyes of the official state, the same bravery to face the inner-city crowd the night Dr. King was shot that might come from being aware of people as people, predating, as it were the modern society that treats people so.  Not unnatural for a man of Irish extraction, a society not far away from the tribal original in custom.

Perhaps it's for the saintly people amongst us, like St. Francis who talked to the wolf and showed him the light of being passive, in touch with the feminine, away from the male domination societies wreak upon all creatures, like Emily, who see firsthand the egotism of certain kinds of monogamy.  Such things happen, such marriages, for survival, but in other regards they ring false to the creature's heart. A more communal, friendlier way we were made to love, passive, humbled, the heart needing no rule imposed upon it, 'til death do us part,' 'let him speak now or forever hold his peace,' the guilty renderings of rules back up by stoning to protect the economic set-up, the property-bearing world.

Marriages happen out in nature, the things of wild animals tamed by their own wild nature.  Mating for life happens in the heart, defiant of rules and polite ways, shoulds and shouldn'ts.  Such things have little to do with the way people are supposed to behave by social rules, because the beast already knows how to act in quite civilized manner, with perfect love and kindness.

Marriage as we know it is for looking good as a renter, a way of fitting in to a society that abuses the natural institution ever more, in a more ironclad legal way, the barrel we must jump over to enjoy economic safety, ever since the Empire and the Industrial Age, the nuclear family a unit of workers.

But such a love is a holy thing, a thing of nature, of spawning salmon and nesting hawks, just that we see it with human eyes, hearts and faces, and to us, it looks different than nature.

The best of us would get skittish, protective of the real thing, which is a gift, or be of two minds, one relationship the practical, the necessary, the sane, the other, the one for love and music and letters and art, the body's fitness, Shakespeare.  A love considerate of all, of nature, the planet, the Universe which is no inanimate object at all and all the space and light and darkness, within and without.

The love of Jesus is out on the road, nowhere to lay his head.  The gentle are rebuked in matters of the social pages.  True marriage, and love, is the property of the meek, the suffering, the poor, of the infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering thing.  And yes, it takes courage to realize where its true habitat lies in this world.

But what choice have we but to shine, to not be Nazis about such matters, judgmental, demanding, disgusted with the other who has no sin but that of being human.

Find a rock to stand on, Corinthians, and then will it all make sense, the love for the shitty dying animal whose day will come.

After shaving the beard off, after the hair cut the next day, groceries, I go for a walk, up Massachusetts Avenue, past the Embassy of Japan, past the Turkish fortress with Ataturk's statue, past the Saudi mosque's minaret, past cherry trees in full bloom, I cross the bridge and step off the sidewalk onto the lawn that leads down into the paths through the woods and along the stream.  The first green buds have come out, on Mulberry and Honeysuckle, and buds are out up in the high trees, and the stream is running well, making sound as it ripples and makes its current as it seeks away toward the sea.  The weather has warmed.  I see a hawk in a tree.  I walk along the stream, first up to the footbridge, below the Omni Shoreham, to look down into the water to see if anything is swimming in the current.  Young male mallards, four, come flying in and under the bridge and land behind me in the waters, then drift back under the bridge below me in a row to join another.

Walking back, out of the woods the cars along the wide avenue are stopped in long rows at the traffic lights.  Like the early scene, before words, of Fellini's movie about the director's life, the blank faces, frozen, the motionless, the excessive quality.  Here, more than half in upscale motorcars.  (I recognize a tightwad tipper in a silver convertible Porsche.)  In Fellini's dream of striving humanity going nowhere, the director character, Mastroianni, of course, begins to feel the claustrophobia, and indeed, his car, stylish, black, starts to fill up with fog, and we hear him going tight of breath.  We see his shoed foot trying to kick out the window.  And then the dream takes him (if I have the sequence correctly) flying, way up above the surf and sand, a human kite, still with cape and hat, and then suddenly falling.  As one falls in dreams, alarmingly, fast, a long way down.  At which point he wakes up, startled and about to pant, in a place where he is taking the cure.

Fellini's dream is not that much different from the sensations of the impressions I have as I walk along the sidewalk, tramping slowly after a nice slow walk getting my feet in touch with the dirt and the rocks, the stumps, the mud, the slopes by the feeding streams.

I was a complete young jerk like many another, aping an image, thinking I was cool.  But at least I've dropped that, humble now, glad to have an old pair of binoculars strung down from my neck as I trudge back.  I am no longer playing the role, the stern bad-ass lawyer in pole position at the traffic light by the mosque with perfect hair, attitude, suit, BMW, impatient grip on the steering wheel.

I am going nowhere special in life, maybe, as far as I know, off to economic disasters I cannot now comprehend, but it's found to be hard to look at all the faces of a Friday rush hour and wonder, the attitude, I am going somewhere.  And where are you taking the rest of us?  What is happening to the creatures we share the world of nature with?  The faces look forward, frozen.


Out in the woods, finally feeling at home, relaxed and at peace, I am alone, blank as a person as the hawk in the tree is blank as a hawk, simply what it is.  Freed from the past, complete in the present.  Waiting.  Alive as if in and of the original garden, free of sin, causing as little harm as possible.